Please, Lou, could you forward this to both Marxism and L-I? I am at my job
now, will not be home before very late tonight, and probably will not be able
to get in touch with the lists.
Dear comrades,
Horst Köhler, the managing director of IMF, arrived to Buenos Aires in the
midst of a tremendous storm of wind and rain, just as Count Dracula when he
landed at Whitby. He held meetings with representatives of the Government,
and
of the "official" CGT of Daer. The Vice President, as well as Rodolfo
Terragno
and Raúl Alfonsín (former president, 1983-1989, currently head of the
Radical
Party) performed their dull "we are against your policies" routine. This was
to be expected, so I will not comment on them.
But Daer, oh, Daer!
One of the signs that things are changing in Argentina is the newly born
"strong" position of the scab union leaders of the "official" CGT. Hugo
Moyano, obviously, has called for a march against Teresa Ter Minassian, the
official in charge of Argentina at the IMF who will come on a technical visit
by May 30th, and has violently refused to have a conversation with Köhler,
while Daer, the chief scab (or the scabs´ chief?), agreed to meet him in
"representation of the workers" (he thus plays his role in the bloody comedy
of today´s Argentinian politics).
But pressure from below is so strong that even a spineless guy such as Daer
had to deliver a "strong" discourse, claiming that the IMF generate "fund for
Argentinian recovery". I translate the first paragraphs of the article on _La
Nación_ today. Then, a few comments follow.
TRANSLATION
Daer requested the constitution of a fund for recovery for our country.
Critical: The "dialoguist" union´s central ["dialoguist" is the oligarchic
newspaper´s code name for scab, NMG] met Köhler; Hugo Moyano, against
dialogue, ratified a protest against IMF.
The directive board of the CGT headed by Rodolfo Daer met IMF´s managing
director Horst Köhler yesterday, and posed the necessity that "IMF and other
financial organizations contribute to give the foreign debt a better profile
and to provide lower interest rates, by means of an international reparation
fund that favors countries that, as Argentina, have carried on their
adjustement processes". The union´s central criticized the fact that while
credit organisms "approve commercial agreements whose only objective is to
protect the rights of those who invest their money -they explained- ignore
the
problems of those who invest their labor".
ENDS TRANSLATION
One does not know what is more marvelous here: if contempt for people, who
are
supposed to accept the thesis that the IMF has an interest in those who
"invest labor", or self-delusion. I would have paid to be in Köhler´s shoes.
The uproar of laughter that must have come out of his hotel room yesterday
night must have been of Gargantuan proportions. Hadn´t it been for the gale
he
brought with him, everyone would have heard it.
But the signs are clear. Even the scabs must make a grimace and show their
(eroded) teeth. There is a couple of lines in the _Martín Fierro_, which
freely and criminally translated read something like "if fire is to give heat
/ it must come from beneath". There must be a hell of a fire beneath the
soles
of these bastards, to have them deliver so hard a speech when conversing with
such a serious person as Köhler!
Hah!
Lic. Néstor M. Gorojovsky
Dirección de Estadísticas del Sector Primario
Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos
Argentina
Tel.: (0541) 349-9728
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/